Luck led Stanford to a 12-1 record and played brilliantly in a rout of Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl, confirming the consensus that he would be the top player selected in the draft. Luck also finished second to Auburn quarterback Cam Newton in the voting for the 2010 Heisman Trophy. Luck’s father, Oliver, said his son wanted to complete his degree in architectural design, a rigorous major in the school of engineering. Luck also felt, his father said, the tug of finishing his career with the players with whom he entered school.

“He wants to finish with those guys,” Oliver Luck said in a phone interview. “It’s a great group of players. That was by far the most important factor.”

Oliver Luck was listening to radio hosts criticize the decision and recalled the psychological test in which people perceive different things in inkblots.

– Pete Thamel, N.Y. Times.

I guess people feel the need to criticize just about every decision everybody ever makes, but a college athlete’s choice to stay in college or go pro has always seemed impossible to quibble with one way or the other. I suppose if a guy isn’t ready to go pro it’s one thing, but then people said that about Mark Sanchez and the decision seems to have turned out OK.

The way I see it, there are plenty of good reasons to turn pro and plenty of good reasons to stay in college. When Jeff Green and Greg Monroe left Georgetown for the NBA, I couldn’t fault either because they stood to make a lot of money and they’d risk injury (and jeopardizing their immediate earning potential) if they returned for another year with the Hoyas. When Roy Hibbert stuck around all four years, I thought it was awesome, since the development time in college would clearly benefit his NBA career and because he was able to earn a college degree.

Plus, you know, college is fun and everything. But then probably being a millionaire athlete is pretty fun too.

Essentially, if you’re a star college athlete with big-time professional prospects, you’re in something of a win-win situation. Luck, for his part, gets the opportunity to compete for the Heisman Trophy and a national title and to earn a Stanford diploma. To him, clearly, those were valuable enough to forgo the immediate riches of the draft.

This column in the Daily News got me thinking about some glory-days stuff:

In 10 years of playing organized football, I played for a lot of bad teams. Outside of one notable blip in eighth grade, every single club was somewhere between crappy and downright terrible.

And perhaps none sucked as much as my high school team in my junior year. Our starting quarterback broke his arm two weeks before practices began in a drunken backyard incident. Our backup quarterback struggled with ankle problems all season. Multiple players missed multiple games with legal troubles. The average weight of our offensive linemen was probably around 175 pounds. We had a few decent players, but holes pretty much everywhere.

We finished the year 1-7, our only win coming against perennial conference patsy West Hempstead. But it almost wasn’t that way. We were quite nearly 2-6.

Some odd Saturday in the middle of the season we were scheduled to play New Hyde Park. The Gladiators, as they were known, never quite pulled out a conference or Long Island-championship in those years, but we could never figure out why. Every season they embarrassed us, even more than we were normally embarrassed.

We were playing at home that afternoon, and we were warming up in a light drizzle when the New Hyde Park team filed off the school bus.

They were, to a man, tremendous. Later, players on our team would half-joke that the district must have been distributing steroids. Every single dude was like 6’2″ and 220 pounds, and most of them had their jerseys tucked up under their shoulder pads to show off their six-pack abs. Oh, and most of them had dark visors and sported neck-roll pads, which never seemed to really protect against anything but served to make already frightening dudes look intimidating as hell.

The drizzle turned to hard rain and eventually a full-on downpour, so our coaches led us back into the locker room to dry off and get focused in the 20 minutes before game time. The room, in the dark basement of the school, reeked of 40 years worth of sweat spilled mostly in vain. We sat on long benches and spoke in hushed tones. Everyone was drenched. A couple guys were visibly terrified.

As the storm continued, our head coach went out to meet with the referees and opposing coaches to discuss the conditions. In the meantime, the assistant coach emerged from his office to address us.

He spoke for about 15 minutes straight, and I can’t now remember a word he said. All I know is this: It was the most inspiring and perhaps very best motivational speech of all time. Honestly. Dude made Patton look like Ben Stein.

There must have been stuff in there about the rain and our pride and our home field and all the stuff that gets high-school football types fired up. It built in a slow crescendo, coach yelling about what we were about to do to them and how we were going to do it. Even those few terrified scrubs started looking mean, determined, excited.

He ended abruptly and told us to line up by the locker room door to march out to the field together. I remember standing there in electric silence with my heart racing, feeling as connected to my teammates as I could ever be to anyone at that age. Every guy in line knew we were about to walk out on the field and promptly beat the piss out of the biggest, baddest team in the conference.

We could hear the rain splashing outside as we prepared to file out. Finally the door swung open.

Our soaked head coach stood in the doorway.

“Game’s canceled, boys.”

New Hyde Park came back on Monday afternoon and beat us handily.

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…

– Bills reciever Stevie Johnson, via Twitter.

You’ve probably seen Johnson’s postgame Tweet by now and have read all about how he lashed out at higher powers after a dropped touchdown pass. And odds are you enjoyed a good chuckle.

Twitter is a strange and funny place. Reporters use it to break news, some people try to convey reasonably complex opinions in 140 characters, and some — this guy, say — mostly use it to make jokes and solicit restaurant recommendations.

But most people — or maybe just most people I follow — seem to use it primarily as some sort of emotional sounding board, sort of an open IM to the world of their instantaneous reactions to the news the reporters just broke or whatever just happened on their TVs. And 140 characters are plenty for that.

And with more and more athletes signing on to Twitter, fans (and journalists, for that matter) gain a type of access to players that I’m not sure ever before existed. We are presented emotion unfiltered by newspapers and the postgame cliche fomalities, and insight into players’ lives outside their sport. A few feeds are obviously operated by publicists. Of the others, some turn out to be interesting. Others not so much.

Regardless, as I learn more about a player — even if it’s just the way he consciously chooses to portray himself to the world — I find that a funny thing happens: I feel like I actually know them, and because when push comes to shove I generally like the people I know, I start rooting for them in a different way than I would a guy whom I’d just seen in a few boring postgame interviews or read quotes from in a newspaper.

C.J. Wilson comes out to start a World Series game, I don’t just think, “hey here’s a lefty who converted from reliever to starter and had a pretty good season,” I think, “oh hey, it’s @str8edgeracer! I have a pretty decent sense of what this dude’s about, and even though we don’t have a ton of overlapping interests outside of baseball, I hope he succeeds because he seems like a decent dude.” Except I don’t really think it out in words like that; that would be weird.

I know now that Mark Sanchez, Dustin Keller and Nick Mangold like to rip on each other, and that Keller and especially Mangold make plenty of time to interact with fans (Sanchez, presumably, is busy eating Taco Bell, and that’s cool too). I know that Marlins first baseman Logan Morrison is a legitimately hilarious dude, and that Blue Jays outfielder Travis Snider — a man of my own heart — uses the handle @lunchboxhero45 and almost exclusively Tweets about food.

And now I know that Stevie Johnson is a bit of a bugout, prone to meet adversity with overreaction and vaguely existential meltdowns. I know people like that. And hey, we’re all human — his outburst only makes me like him more. Hell, I’ve spent plenty of time myself irrationally wondering if I were being punished for something. I feel you, Stevie Johnson.

So I fear that when the public at large reacts the way it did to Johnson’s freakout — ranging from mockery to sanctimony, but an undoubtedly loud response — we risk forcing athletes to become as guarded in this forum as they are in others. That’s a shame, because candid ballplayers interacting with fans in a public forum benefits all parties involved.

And look: I realize that Johnson’s outburst is indeed funny, and that the public overreacting to, well, public overreaction is pretty much inevitable, so I’m pretty much tilting at windmills here. Plus obviously an absurd tirade is a very different use of Twitter than Sanchez and Keller trading embarrassing photos, and that an athlete using the site responsibly will face no criticism.

I just worry that as more teams’ brass and media-relations types see the response to Johnson’s meltdown, “responsibly” will come to mean “blandly.” And that stinks, because I really like hearing about all the ridiculous things Travis Snider is eating.

Last year, of course, the Giants started 5-0, hit the halfway point at 5-3 and then went 3-5 over the final eight games. Instead of saying he planned to assert himself as a leader and remind his teammates to fight through adversity and learn from last year’s collapse, Manning seems to think what happened in the past stays in the past.

That’s short-sighted….

“Athletes don’t think that way. We don’t think that way.”

But doesn’t it go deeper than simply thinking about the next game?

“No, it doesn’t,” Manning said. “You prepare. You play Philly. You prepare for your next game and you go play. It’s all you can do. It’s all you think about. The only thing I’m worried about is Philly’s defense and their scheme and us getting ready for them.”

– Gary Myers, N.Y. Daily News.

As Chris M pointed out in the comments section yesterday, just last week everyone was penciling the Giants into the Super Bowl. They played poorly against Dallas, no doubt, but it’s still one game.

While it’s hard to fault Myers for pointing to the Giants’ second-half struggles under Tom Coughlin, it’s also difficult to determine exactly the source of those struggles. Certainly the ever-present spectre of randomness could play a part.

Otherwise, if we’re absolutely desperate for a good reason the Giants have gone 41-15 in the first halves of their regular seasons and 20-29 in the latter halves under Coughlin, I’d guess it has more to do with strategy and the coaches’ inability to adjust the Giants’ gameplans for teams that have a half-season worth of video to scout than the complacency and lack of accountability Myers seems eager to diagnose.

Because Manning’s quotes in the column seem to embody exactly the type of mental fortitude we usually celebrate in winning players and teams. Mariano Rivera, most notably, is constantly praised for his ability to put his rare mishaps behind him and focus on the task at hand.

I can’t say that this is necessarily the case for all athletes, but it seems that — and Manning suggests — they are generally better served planning for the next challenge then worrying about the past or distant future (those responsibilities fall on the coaches and GMs).

Plus Manning is probably in a no-win situation when asked if he’s thinking about the past: If he says he is, he’s sure to be lambasted for letting the “collapses” get into his head. If he says he isn’t, he’s guilty of “short-sighted” thinking.